Today, there is a plugin called Duplicator: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/duplicator It's literally a three-step process and works like a charm. Used this multiple times already to deploy a website from a test environment to a live one.
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MatthiasJul 30 '12 at 12:04

22 Answers
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@Insanity5902: Deployment of a WordPress site from one box to another has been a PITA since day one I started working with WordPress. (Truth-be-told it was a PITA with Drupal for 2 years before I started with WordPress so the problem is certainly not exclusively with WordPress.)

It bothered me that every time I needed to move a site I'd have to spend so much often duplicated effort and it kept me from deploying to test as frequently as I would have preferred. So about 4-6 months ago I started working on a plugin to solve the webhost migration problem and I mentioned my ideas on the WP Tavern forum.

Well fast forward to today and I've pretty much got it working and I'm conveniently calling it "WP Migrate Webhosts." Even though the plugin is still very much beta (probably even alpha) given your question I think I'm ready to let people start banging on it.

The envisioned use-case is that 1.) first the developer handles uploading all the changed theme and plugin files via FTP, 2.) then uploads the development MySQL database to the testing server in its entirety and finally 3.) then runs the plugin to migrate any references from the prior domain to the new one. (My plugin does not attempt to solve the merging of new database fields or tables with live data; THAT is a much bigger problem that I'm not sure how to solve.)

You can download the plugin from my website and unzip into your plugins directory (if you don't know how to do this then this plugin is not for you because it requires someone who knows what they are doing to use it.) I'll keep this plugin online until I release it to WordPress.org after which you should look for it there.

To use it you take a different approach in your wp-config.php that normal by commenting out the four (4) defines DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD and DB_HOST and instead registering the defaults for webhosts and then registering info about each webhost itself. Here's what that segment of wp-config.php might look like (note the first section is the unneeded code commented out and also note that I set up my hosts file on my local machine with non-routable .dev top level domains to make day-to-day development easier. On the Mac VirtualHostX makes this a breeze):

Hopefully this is (mostly) self explanatory. I attempted to make the code as clean as I could but unfortunately it requires those two cryptic require_once() lines before and after the block of webhost registration code since there was no way for me to "hook" WordPress before wp-config.php is called.

Once you have updated your wp-config.php then you can simply use the URL shortcut wp-migrate-webhosts to go to the admin screen like so:

The above will take you to an admin screen like the following which has a fair bit of description text and allows you to migrate FROM any of the other webhost domains with a single click after selecting the domains to migrate from (NOTE: this example shows going DOWN from test/stage/live servers to local development but rest assured it can migrate TO any domain where it happens to be located. This also means the plugin will be great for taking an existing live site and quickly getting a local development environment working!):

If it's not clear "migration" in this context means to update all the references in the current database to be appropriate for the currently defined webhost (and "current" is sniffed by inspecting $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].)

What's cool about the plugin is that it implements some basic migrations but anyone can hook it and perform their own migrations. For example, if you add a gallery plugin that stored full paths to images in the database you could hook the migrate_webhosts action which will be passed the "from" webhost and the "to" webhost each as an array of metadata and you'll be allowed to perform whatever you need to do in the database using SQL or any applicable WordPress API functions to do the migration. Yes any of us could do this without the plugin but without the plugin I found that writing all the code needed was more effort than it was worth. With the plugin it's just easier to write these tiny hooks and get it over with.

You may also find my migrations fail in edge cases I've not tested and maybe you can help me improve the plugin? Anyone who wants to can email me via my gmail account (my alias is "mikeschinkel.")

Also, the plugin was designed to accept user-define webhost metadata in addition to the ones it recognizes like database, user, password, host, domain etc. A perfect example might be googlemaps_apikey where you can store a the different API keys for each domain that your Google Map's plugin needs to operate correct (who among you who has used a Google Maps plugin hasn't deployed an app to a live server and forgotten to change the code to the correct API key? Come on, be honest... :) With this plugin, a googlemaps_apikey element in your register_webhost() array and a small custom migrate_webhosts hook you can effectively eliminate that as a concern!

P.S. If you do decide to use this remember it is alpha/beta and that means it will change so be prepared for some minor surgery if you want to use it now and then use the released version once its been beaten on by many hands.

P.P.S. What are my goals with this? I've love to see this migrate into WordPress core so that everybody would have access to it. But before that can even be considered lots of people have to be interested in using it to ensure it actually solves more problems then it potentially could create. So if you like the idea then by all means use it and help me gain momentum with it for eventual hopeful inclusion into WordPress core.

Nice solutions I've got a couple of questions though 1) Do you still need to define the WP_SITEURL to get into the admin area? 2) Does the tool on display for only Administrator Users? (not sure if the Tool section displays for non-admin's)
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Ryan GibbonsAug 12 '10 at 15:14

Hi @Insanity5902: 1) No need to set WP_SITEURL, the plugin does for you. You actually are setting it when you "register" a "domain" and "sitepath" for a webhost. In normal WordPress operation WP_SITEURL is required to be set either in code or the database to ensure nobody spoofs the URL and does nefarious things because on an unexpected value in $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']. The WP Migrate Websites plugin sets WP_SITEURL indirectly based on $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] but it will ONLY do so if the current domain matches one of the domains you've defined in your wp-config.php file, nothing else.
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MikeSchinkelAug 12 '10 at 16:32

2.) The URL shortcut I mentioned actually does a redirect into the admin console so it is only for people logged into the admin. I don't have specific checks for administrator only built in yet though. I've never added capabilities to a plugin but will be needing to fully research how in the next few weeks so can work on that over the next month. However the plugin is not destructive; it can ONLY migrate to the current domain and the process is repeatable so even if a non-admin got in there's really no harm they could do with it, at least not that I can envision.
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MikeSchinkelAug 12 '10 at 16:32

So, what's the state of affairs for this plugin? It looks mighty appealing but I would like something mature and well-vetted. This post is the only information I can find on it.
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Kevin C.Nov 1 '12 at 18:27

My favourite hack; add a setting to your /etc/hosts to make the production domain point to your development box, just on your machine. To deploy to production you rsync all the files and push the database over.

The risks of this strategy are clear; you might confuse your development environment with your production environment.

Yes! I'm so glad I wasn't the only person to have thought of that! any difference between dev and prod is bad. Removing that difference altogether is far better than trying to work around it. And this setup takes no work at all. One can even do testing on a virtual machine with modded hosts file if needed.
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Alexander BirdNov 21 '11 at 19:19

WPEngine has an exclusive feature called “staging.” Here’s how it works: Before you make a scary change to your blog, click the “snapshot” button. We make a complete copy of your blog and set it up in a separate, safe area. You can play with anything you want; nothing’s live. Only when you’re ready to make it live do you touch your main site.

Looks like a very easy way to quickly move from development to production, especially with an already live site.

That's a very nice option indeed and will be great for many people! That of course doesn't work for embedded URLs nor does it help for people who develop locally so they can use an IDE with a debugger. Now if WPEngine can create an interaction that merges a local deploy too then it will really be something (Technosailor, you listening?)
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MikeSchinkelAug 12 '10 at 16:35

Agreed, that would be a fantastic addition.
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tnorthcuttAug 20 '10 at 11:55

The snapshot feature copies only from production to staging, not the other way around. It's great for testing changes, but it won't help for deploying to production.
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samMay 2 '13 at 20:44

Community:
Please let us know about your successes or any issues you might run into! In an effort to more easily manage the various threads please post issues to the WordPress.org plugin forums. Please do not post any logging data from the plugin into the online forums. Logging data can be submitted to our support site.

I am personally addressing this issue with my project on Github, called Autopress. I don't have a perfect solution yet, but I'm getting closer, especially with the wpstage plugin from the wpengine folks.

Just checked out your script. Nice. If I understood it installs a fresh WP on the server. The question here is how to migrate from development to production. Can it help with that?
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SrulyAug 11 '10 at 23:18

This looks promising. We are working on some scripts to handle migrating some of the data, wp-options for example, changing paths in the db, a copying over media.

The issue I have is that the live site continues to grow while the other is in development. One site we work on has 20 posts a day and over 3,000 comments per day. That is too much data to move over with phpmyadmin or via the command line. Also, moving the data around always causes UTF issues for some reason.

Also, now that it looks like menu options are stored in the DB, I have even more to deal with.

I check all my code into SVN and deploy the code via FTP from the server (Beanstalk). This does not make the changes to the DB for me though or activate new plugins.

My plan right now is to create a manifest file while I am developing to do all my changes to the live site.

For example the file would have human readable lines

It would include plugins to activate, wp-options to move over, images to move, pages to move.
Then my plugin, would detect the manifest file and make all the changes to the staging site.

Once I tested that and was sure I got everything, I could be sure it would work on production.

This plugin is still just an idea, but I have some code written for it.

Also, if you want to make changes to just the URL in you DB, you can use the following SQL.

Just a note, my sql call may break you serialized data. s:14:blogs.prod.com has the length encoded as 14. After running the code, we now have s:14:dev.prod.com which is corrupt. Should be s:12:dev.prod.com use with caution.
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AndrewAug 25 '10 at 0:04

I use subversion's export command to install the WordPress files (http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags//) as well as all plugins in the repository (http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org//tags//), then just zip the theme and custom plugins and install them normally. Once all of that is up and running without content, I export the test DB and do a search/replace for the URL AND the filepath (stored for media) and import into an empty database, then just switch the database info in wp-config.php. Generally takes me about 10 - 20 minutes.

Normally I login to phpMyadmin upload the database and edit the contents of wp_options>siteurl and wp_options>home to the expected domain. If you need to update URLs within your posts and pages content you can do a search/replace for the URL and the media/uploads path on the .SQL file prior to uploading. It's a quick job.

While there's no shortage of good solutions here, in the spirit of sharing I thought I would add my bash deploy script to the pile: https://github.com/jplew/SyncDB

SyncDB is bash deploy script meant to take the tedium out of synchronizing
local and remote versions of a Wordpress site. It allows developers working in
a local environment (eg. MAMP) to rapidly "push" or "pull" changes to or from
their production server with a single terminal command.

This script works well with Mark Jaquith's WP-Skeleton, and harnesses mysqldump, git and rsync to synchronize your entire site—database, code, and media—in two easy steps:

Another paying solution: the Xtreme One theme framework released version 1.2 with Xtreme Backup which allows you to "export or import the settings of your Childthemes, Layouts or Widgets with all their settings/content as XML file."

This may not have been around when you asked the question, but I've been using a service called Blogvault for a couple months and it has done this flawlessly. I've probably done over 50 migrations (crossing domains, sub-domains, and web hosts), not a hitch and takes no time at all.

RAMP is a new content deployment plugin from Crowd Favorite, and it looks really slick. It's $250, though, so I haven't tried it out yet. Might just pay for itself in the amount of time saved, though, so I'm considering it.

The big benefit that it has over most of the other methods mentioned, is that it can intelligently merge posts, comments, etc. It's not just importing a mysqldump, it's more like source control for the database. For example, when deploying a post, it'll also deploy the tags for that post, if they don't already exist in production.

...and then you work your way from there. DB_NAME, DB_USER... table_prefix. Personally I switch on ALTERNATE_WP_CRON on local (to avoid some annoying warnings), WP_DEBUG of on both (if you're not a developer) or on live-only (if you are), another ini_set('display_errors', '0'); for live could also do good, ant lastly, as mentioned above: WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL to the respective local/actual url.

I have been using the backupbuddy plugin for a while now. It lets you make a backup of database and all files, download it as a zip or send it directly to another server via FTP. It also does the URL find and replace for you. It usually takes me about 5 minutes to go through the entire process. And because all files are zipped the uploading/downloading process is much faster. And no, I do not work for them, but this plugin has really made this whole process much easier.